By LUCIANO NASCIMENTO*
Comment on the documentary with Emicida as the protagonist
AmarElo – it's all for yesterday is the name of the documentary released this month (Dec/2020) by NetFlix and has Emicida as the protagonist. The film features behind-the-scenes footage of a performance by rapper at Teatro Municipal de São Paulo, as well as clippings from other passages with the artist, composing a mosaic of fragments of apparitions and ideas traversed and framed by the same African proverb: “Exu killed a bird yesterday with a stone he threw today”.
There is much to be said about the aesthetic aspects of the “brute flower” into which a work that brings together Fernanda Montenegro and Lélia Gonzalez, Mario de Andrade and Dona Ivone Lara, among other personalities, is transformed to speak of black power, Brazilian power, human power , potency… and fulfillment, fulfillment and fulfillment. There's a lot to say, but I won't be the one to say it. I just want to draw attention to another aspect that I consider central to the film: the political-pedagogical proposal it performs. I speak of her because I believe in her.
In a pedagogical device that plays with the linearity in which so many try to imprison Time – a waste of energy. It is much more productive to assume right away, as the film shows, that present, past and future are one, here and now: Aleijadinho, Ismael Silva and Emicida's little daughter playing a rattle on her father's shoulders; Ancient Egypt, Colonial Brazil and the Old Republic; 1822, 1922 and 2020.
In a political effort that makes space and discursive interdictions dance that try to segregate blacks, women, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, transvestites and several other subjects, aiming to take away from them and from them the opportunity to be, just to be them and themselves. Hence the absolute importance of Emicida's protagonism on that stage, and, even more, of the general ecstasy provoked by his meeting, Majur and Pablo Vittar in that same space.
More than a musical (and now audiovisual) work of art, love him it is the epiphany of the appropriation of the processes of collective construction of rights and freedoms, a bet on the conquest around the certainty that all people deserve to enjoy what – yesterday, today, always – they build. I repeat: all people deserve to enjoy what they build. That's why you can see there, in the documentary, the wonder of those who visit the Municipal Theater for the first time in the place of art producers and/or the public, but you also see the screen placed outside the theater, for those who still once more he could not enter it; that is why, in the documentary, sign language interpreters can be seen actively collaborating so that the hearing impaired could enjoy the show.
AmarElo – it's all for yesterday it is, finally, the demonstration of the viability of a way of seeing, living and translating life, favoring the meeting of differences with a view to sharing the common. It is, in my view, the political-pedagogical proposal and, above all, the method that we need to bring to our classrooms as soon as possible. Before it's even later and even the future can no longer come to be.
* Luciano Nascimento He holds a PhD in Literature (UFSC) and teaches Basic, Technical and Technological Education at Colégio Pedro II.
Reference
Emicida: AmarElo - It's All For Yesterday
Brazil, documentary, 2020, 89 minutes
Directed by: Fred Ouro Preto